Blenheim

A popular biography of the greatest English house from its conception and building in the opening decade of the eighteenth century to the burial of Winston Churchill in the early 1960s. Using the vast Blenheim papers (now in the British Museum) together with local Oxfordshire documents and archives Marian Fowler has been able to trace the history not just of its famous inhabitants but also of the building itself and the thousands of servants and workmen who have kept it functioning over the years. There will be four long core chapters each taking a specific event at Blenheim (the first is a theatrical performance of a Dryden play put on by his grandchildren for the almost senile first Duke of Marlborough) and moving out from that to general description of the place and its inhabitants at that time. The four events will each be separated by about 60 years.